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The Antidote to Willfulness: Manufacturing Dissent, Kony 2012, and Propaganda As a Technology of Governance

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The Antidote to Willfulness: Manufacturing Dissent, Kony 2012, and Propaganda As a Technology of Governance THE ANTIDOTE TO WILLFULNESS: MANUFACTURING DISSENT, KONY 2012, AND PROPAGANDA AS A TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE BY JOHN WESLEY JONES JR. DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Policy Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Cameron McCarthy, Chair Professor William Cope Associate Research Professor Anita Chan Associate Professor Pradeep Dhillon ABSTRACT This dissertation presents a new definition of propaganda using the massively viral internet video KONY 2012 as an example. KONY 2012 was produced by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Invisible Children, which was founded by three young Americans in order to inform the American public about the crimes of the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Within a few days of its release on the internet, KONY 2012 had become the most viral video of all time up to that point, garnering almost 100 million views on the popular video sharing website YouTube. Contrary to the concept of propaganda as simplistic lies, this dissertation argues that KONY 2012 demonstrates that propaganda is a sophisticated technique for governing and managing the behavior of individuals towards political ends in a literate, information-saturated, liberal democratic society. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE: ........................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION: PROPAGANDA: THE ANTIDOTE TO WILLFULNESS .......... 14 CHAPTER 1: THE HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA .............................................. 48 CHAPTER 2: DEWEY AND LIPPMANN: PROPAGANDA AS A TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE AND THE PLACE OF EDUCATION ......................................... 76 CHAPTER 3: ANALYZING KONY 2012: AUGMENTING STUART HALL’S EN/DE- CODING MODEL WITH A MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL AND LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE .................................................................................................. 99 CHAPTER 4: THE MILITARY-ENTERTAINMENT-COMPLEX AND KONY 2012 AS MILITAINMENT RECRUITMENT STRATEGY FOR VIRTUOUS WAR ............ 130 CHAPTER 5: THE INTEGRATED SPECTACLE: MANUFACTURING DISSENT WITH NETWORKS AND PROPAGANDA ................................................................... 161 CONCLUSION: PROPAGANDA IN A POST-SOCIAL MEDIA AGE ................. 199 REFERENCES .................................................................................................. 206 iii PREFACE Propaganda is a concession to the wilfulness [sic] of the age…The new antidote to wilfulness [sic] is propaganda. If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver. If it will not love, honour [sic] and obey, it must not expect to escape seduction. Propaganda is a reflex to the immensity, the rationality and wilfulness [sic] of the modern world. It is the new dynamic of society, for power is subdivided and diffused, and more can be won by illusion than by coercion. It has all the prestige of the new and provokes all the animosity of the baffled. To illuminate the mechanisms of propaganda is to reveal the secret springs of social action, and to expose to the most searching criticism our prevailing dogmas of sovereignty, of democracy, of honesty, and of the sanctity of individual opinion. The study of propaganda will bring into the open much that is obscure, until, indeed, it may no longer be possible for an Anatole France to observe with truth that "Democracy (and, indeed, all society) is run by an unseen engineer" (Lasswell,1938, p. 222) [emphasis added] Lasswell’s “antidote”, propaganda, is most necessary in the societies that allow the greatest degree of political freedom. It is a cure for a condition that has afflicted modern, post-Enlightenment, liberal democracies since they began appearing more than 200 years ago. This condition results from a tension between the stated ideals upon which democratic republics are founded, such as popular sovereignty and the fitness of all citizens to participate in the democratic process as possessors of reason, 1 and the necessity of stable governance of society. Engels (2011) explains that, “contrary to the misperception cultivated by politicians and pundits today, the United States was not born a democracy; quite the opposite, for democracy was portrayed as an enemy to political virtue and national stability in the years following the American Revolution. In the 1780s, democracy was compared to a volcano, a plague, a cancer, a storm, and a wild fire” (p. 131). This fear of democracy, called “demophobia” by Robert L. Ivie (2005), “imagines the demos as an undisciplined mass, a murderous horde that is not only deaf to right speech but exudes its own toxic speech that spreads demotic violence” (Engels, 2011, p. 134). Such was the fear of the democratic horde that founding father Elbridge Gerry posited at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy” (Engels, 2011, p. 131). During the founding period democracy was associated not with popular suffrage, nor a tripartite federal government with a system of checks and balances, but with mob rule and armed conflict like Shays’ Rebellion. The rhetoric of demophobia, exemplified by the Federalist Papers and Alexander Hamilton, birthed a counter-narrative, demophilia, most famously championed by Thomas Jefferson. While demophilia, the love of the people, rejected the fear of democracy prevalent during the founding period, Engels (2011) points out that even this counter-narrative was concerned with the correct governance of the democratic impulse: “Like demophobia, demophilia is ultimately a discourse that can be used to tame democracy—for it shapes how democracy is lived, altering what is sayable and thinkable, who can speak and in what ways” (p. 134). The uneasiness caused by the possibility of democracy has remained until the contemporary period. In the 70s it was forcefully expressed in a landmark report 2 authored by three researchers from the Trilateral Commission. The Report, The Crisis of Democracy (1975), written in the wake of the politically tumultuous 1960s expressed many of the same reservations about democracy that were prevalent during the founding period of the nation, arguing that, “some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy” (p.113). The authors argue that the social upheaval of the 1960s had led to contradictory claims on the government, weakening its authority and leading to a “crisis of democracy”. On one hand, diverse groups began to criticize the actions of the government, while on the other, many of these same groups made increasing claims on the government to rectify social ills such as racism and wealth inequality. Such claims present an unresolvable dilemma that led to pessimism about the future of the viability of democracy, according to the authors. The authors identified two challenges internal to the Western democracies that posed a threat for the future of democracy; “adversary intellectuals” and “related groups” and a parallel degradation of social values, and intrinsic contradictions within the system of democracy itself. Of the first challenge, the report says: “The development of an "adversary culture" among intellectuals has affected students, scholars, and the media… In some measure, the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimation of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. In an age of widespread secondary school and university education, the pervasiveness of the mass media, and the displacement of manual labor by clerical and professional employees, this 3 development constitutes a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by the aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties (Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975, pp. 6-7). The authors also noted a concomitant change in the values of the non-intellectual public: “a shift in values is taking place away from the materialistic work-oriented, public- spirited values toward those which stress private satisfaction, leisure, and the need for belonging and intellectual and esthetic self-fulfillment… [These values} often coexist with greater skepticism towards political leaders and institutions and with greater alienation from the political processes. They tend to be privatistic in their impact and import (Crozier, Huntington, & Watanuki, 1975, p. 7). The above developments are both challenges that arise from within a democratic society, and indeed, such developments are perhaps bred and encouraged by the freedom of political expression given to individuals in such societies, and the relatively high degree of affluence that obtains in the “trilateral nations” (the US, Western Europe, and Japan). The authors of the report make this very argument, saying that: “there are the intrinsic challenges to the viability of democratic government which grow directly out of the functioning of democracy. Democratic government does not necessarily function in a self-sustaining or self-correcting equilibrium fashion. It may instead function so as to give rise to forces and tendencies which, if unchecked
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